1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to designing oral pet products, and more particularly to formulating and marketing various oral pet products based on biometric analysis of capabilities among different classes of pets for improved safety and functional effectiveness.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional oral pet products, including chews and kibbles, are designed principally according to pets' body weight. That is, taking for example dogs, most oral dog products are available in small, medium and large sizes, in order to accommodate dogs of small, medium and large body size, respectively. Indeed, the packaging of many conventional oral dog products include labels advising consumers on how appropriate the given product may be for their pet. One example is IAMS® TARTAR TREATS™. The packaging of these edible dental chews indicates product appropriateness as being “For Small Dogs (20 lbs or less), For Medium Dogs (21-50 lbs), For Large Dogs (51 lbs or more)”. These product ranges commonly only vary in overall size of the product with smaller sizes designed for smaller dogs and larger sizes formulated for larger dogs. Product shapes, dimension ratios and textures of the different product sizes, however, remain constant.
A significant drawback of formulating and marketing oral products for pets based solely on body weight is that doing so fails to account for more fundamental anatomical, and particularly morphological, considerations of the animal. As just one example, dogs, an anatomically diverse species, generally possess one of three very distinct skull shapes, all of which provide a very different mouth shape and function. Accordingly, both safety and functional effectiveness are overlooked with conventional products that differ only for dog size, thereby exposing dogs to potential injury and even causing an inadvertent increased risk of death.
The failure to account for additional anatomical considerations has resulted in an increasing number of pet injuries and deaths from hazardous or, more commonly, ill-suited oral products. Choking frequently results when the pets, particularly dogs and cats, are unable to break apart a given product, such as a chew, because the texture of the chew is too hard for that class of pet to bite through. Consequently, dogs will swallow the chew, either whole or in large pieces, which it cannot completely chew, which may then become lodged in its throat or in the intestines.
Alternatively, a dog may fracture its tooth on a chew of too hard a texture or an inappropriate shape. Such injuries are common when the respective grooves or contours on a dog chew are inappropriately designed or the chew is too hard for dogs of a certain skull type a factor that determines the orientation of the teeth within the animal's jaw and its biting strength at each tooth position.
The continued recurrence of such pet injuries due to choking or other accidents from oral products clearly evidences that merely scaling down a given oral pet product in order to match the animal's body proportion fails to effectively remedy these ongoing hazards. Accordingly, there is a need for a method of designing and appropriately marketing an oral pet product that applies biometric analysis to capabilities such as bite force and gape size, and determines the distribution of each across various classes of pet including classes defined by skull type, age, breed and/or sex, all in addition to simple body size and weight.